Lurk on, dude, lurk on!

The other day, while catching up on my (ever growing) pocket reading list, I came across a post from, friend and fellow MobiMOOC colleague, Inge on MOOCs. It was a rather on-the-nose post about MOOCs, learning, assessment, and the discourse used in MOOCs about learners. Concurrently I am working with a Rhizo team on a social network analysis post where the topic of 'completion' came up, and

Social Presence and Relateability

This week has been rough in the office. We learned that our colleague - and my former professor - Pepi Leistyna passed away. Details are scant at the moment and everyone in the department is in a state of shock as his death was quite sudden and unexpected. I was going to write a blog post about about my history with him, how I knew him as a person when I worked in Media Services (good ol'

Recently I read an article on Your Training Edge which aims to correct misconceptions surrounding MOOCs. The title of this particular post, and I guess myth that they tried to correct, was "MOOCs Aren’t Interactive, So There’s No Real Learning Taking Place". The basic idea in this misconception is really preposterous. I don't know when interactive became synonymous with learning, but it is

Of MOOCs, online courses, content, and teaching - whoa, that's a lot!

Alright, being now back from my mini vacation, and back into the regular rhythm of work, reading, and very soon classes, I've caught up with a lot of my saved Pocket articles. The one thing I saw is, still, the very schizo nature of MOOC reporting and commentary. This reminds me a bit of the headlines, back in the day on Engadget and other tech sites, about studies on cell phones causing/not

Designing in the Open (and in connected ways)

Wow, hard to believe, but we've reached the final module of Connected Courses (and boy is my brain tired!). I found out last week that there may be a slim chance of me being able to teach Introduction to Instructional Design (INSDSG 601, a graduate course) at some point in the new future. This is something that was offered to me a couple of summers ago, but being away on vacation at the time

Can students opt out if you teach in Open Learning?

Siemens, 2014It seems like Connected Courses is the cMOOC that keeps on adding while we are in the process of conducting the course. I think, based on my own personal experience, that this (the addition of "features" as the course is in progress) is a hallmark of cMOOCs ;-).Anyway, Discussion forums have been added to Connected Courses, and a discussion cropped up on whether students can

The perils of external rewards

A couple of years ago I was working on hashing out this idea of Academic Check-ins. Think of it as Foursquare meets informal learning meets campus engagement meets alternative credentialing. A paper came out of that brainstorming with a proposal of what such a system might look like. While working on hashing out some ideas I wanted to dive deeper into this concept of motivation, both internal

MOOC on vacation: what does "completing a MOOC" mean?

View from Itea, Greece Some people bring a book on vacation (which I have) and others immerse themselves in the local culture (which I am also doing to some extent), but since I find myself lucky enough to be vacationing somewhere with fast wifi access I decided to continue to MOOC while I am on vacation from the day job. I honestly don't know how well the experiment will go, but I decided to follow

No Walled Gardens badge

Well, we are in Week 9 (or 13) in the course I am teaching this semester, and the badges experiment is continuing! This weekend, as I was reading assignment submissions, I saw that some students, in their design documents, have started incorporating Web 2.0 tools (should we just call them "web tools" now?) that encourage the use, formation, or exploration of personal learning environments

Encouraging Independence, part II

I am attending, and presenting, at NERCOMP 2014 today. As I was checking Blackboard over the past couple of days and "grading" feedback pieces submitted by my students, I noticed an interesting trend in the feedback (and some emails sent by students) that reminded me of #Rhizo14 (week 2?): encouraging independence.We are now in week 8 (of 13) in this course and students are put into groups of three

Discussion Kindler Badge - revealed!

Well, it seems one more week has passed by in INSDSG619, and one more badge had been earned by some learners, and therefore revealed to everyone! Last week the Discussion Initiator was revealed, and this week, the Discussion Kinder has come out!Discussion KindlerDescription:This badge is awarded to students who have made an effort to keep the discussion going by responding to peers and helping to tease

One More Badge - discovered!

We are now in the middle of Week 7 (of 13) of the course I am teaching (INSDSG 619: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses) and one more of the secret badge is revealed!Discussion InitiatorCriteria: Must hit all elements of the discussion board grading rubric,Must be the first to respond in any given week, Must be a post that encourages other to respond and engage in discussion (i.e. have

Blogging, Lurkers, and Schrödinger's cat

Alright, so I guess we are entering the final frontier of #rhizo14 here, with week 11. Perhaps I should stop counting weeks and call this series of posts "This Week in Rhizo14" ;-) Last week I missed some discussions on P2PU, which I've gone back and answered some questions directed to me, but I think this ends my formal mingling in P2PU for Rhizo14 and I will focus more one the PLE aspect

Here come the lurkers!

Well, It's week 9 of Rhizo14 (or week 3 of the after party of rhizo14, depending on how you look at it.) Last week we had a discussion on de-mobing teachers (I guess enabling teachers to not teach to the test?). To be honest I lurked a bit last week on facebook since the day job, the other work obligations, the DML conference (which was awesome!) and subsequent weekend food poisoning

2013 MOOC Learnings

Apple's Clarus the cowdog;and his "moof" 'barkWell, it's the end of 2013 and it's been a MOOC-kinda year, so before I head off for a small break (which is probably going to involve a lot of MOOCing), I thought I should write a summative post for my year's exploits in MOOCs.2013, other than it being the year of the Anti-MOOC (according to some) was really the year of the xMOOC for me. I participated

MOOC Participants who liked this post, also found this useful....

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forumA couple of years ago when I was putting pen to paper and I was working on my Academic Check-ins paper I was doing some more research into recommender systems, you know the systems like the ones that they have on Amazon.com and Netflix whereby if you rate a certain product in a certain way, or if you view certain products, more recommendations come

#edcmooc - almost human

Man, it's been a crazy week. I've been jotting down notes for this post from the various viewings, readings, fellow blogger posts, and discussion forums. This was meant to be several posts over the week, but it all wrapped up into one big thing. Oh well. Such is life ;-) This week I'm creating some category headers to make things easier to read.From the week 2 synchronous sessionThe

Awarding the right thing

scavenged imageI am not sure where I found this blog post (probably through an RSS feed somewhere), but I am glad it came my way. In his initial reflections on the Hyperlinked Library MOOC, this author talk about feeling a bit patronized by earning certain badges. It's like you can't take two steps before someone throws a badge at you and tells you that you're awesome ;-)A while back, when

MOOCMOOC (μMOOC) Day 3

We are not half way through our first μMOOC!The topic of today is participation, deliberate participation, in education and learning. This is something near and dear to my own heart, and something I've commented on in at least one (if not more) MOOCs. Without participating, in my opinion, you can't really learn. Of course, there are degrees of participation, and even in online environments there is

It doesn't all start with engagement

I was reading a post on change11 the other day and this video was talked about. The essence of th video is that in education these days we've gone crazy with assessments and we forget about th learner. Fair enough, I believe that this is indeed true in some states and school systems, especially with things like no child left behind. The problem comes in (for me at least) when the people start talking

No consensus on what engagement is?

I am taking a break from #change11 to continue some work on a paper that's been in my mind for a while but I haven't had much time to work on just yet. The overall topic is a proposal for a foursquare type of service for academic environments. Location Based Services fall a bit short because GPS doesn't figure out what rooms you are in, so the article is going to propose a hybrid of